fatvegan

"Study after study has demonstrated that Australia relies more heavily on company tax revenue than other comparable countries and that the 30 per cent tax rate is increasingly out of step with global trends" - Phillip Lowe

Britain and the US are cited as examples of countries with lower tax rates. Which is possibly troubling unless one remembers that both of those economies are tanking and have been for some time. It's possible that a heavier dependence on company tax (which many companies don't) is what has helped the Australian economy survive the last 10 years with hardly a blemish. It also may be entirely unrelated, but there still remains no reason at all to be modelling our economic policy on Britain or the US. Soz imperial overlords - no offence intended.

I have decided to invent a new invention. I am going to dub it the Concentrating Cuterie and it works as thus.

Some background: I live in a caravan with a number of adorable wild mice. I love these little guys. But they also drive me a bit crazy. Because they eat my food. And drink my olive oil. And eat my pillows. And eat my cupboards. And eat my caravan walls. And humbug visitors. And smell not cute.

My recent efforts have been to discourage their constant presence by collecting them in little box tip traps, colouring in their tails with coloured markers, and walking them up the valley to a new home. It works quite well. It's nice to go for a walk. It's nice to see them run off into a slightly more wild bush. It's nice not to crush or drown them in death traps. However, it's not extraordinarily effective in achieving it's goal.

So my new plan is to develop a Concentrating Cuterie. I am not entirely sure about it, and it rather smacks of liberalism, but I am going to give it a go. Because I am a horrid product of my time.

The Concentrating Cuterie will operate largely like those slippery death drowning pool bucket traps that are so popular (but not with mice). However, instead of a drowning death in a bucket of water-logged little corpses, I'm hoping to soft-land the little guys into a nice straw-filled "home". It will have water and food and lots of adorable friends to play with. And as time goes by, I am hoping that the dispersed (and quite annoying) cuteness will transform into a concentrated (less annoying) cuteness hub.

And then, from time to time, I will walk the Concentrating Cuterie up the valley and after a brief desocialisation workshop, will release the little guys that want to leave, into the wild.

That is my invention.

Warning: Aggregate cuteness is not strictly linear with effectiveness of concentration.

For other owners of Euromaid WM5, please be aware of the risks associated with the Babycare and Intensive cycle. While the Babycare cycle is quite safe for your baby, the Intensive cycle most definitely is not. It is a known flaw in the design of these washers that resulted in the Intensive and Babycare cycles being placed adjacently on the dial. So take care when setting your wash cycles. Note that the Daily XPress cycle is also OK for your baby but may result in shortened life.

I am reading I Am Pilgrim, which is the thriller of the year by all accounts. It's racist and sexist, but otherwise not bad and very entertaining. It is about an America secret service agent who goes around the world torturing and assassinating people who annoy him, for the good of his country. He spends much of the book getting various folks in the secret service to found out private information on people. Every time Echelon is mentioned you can hear the author smiling merrily. So far my favourite part so far is when he's hanging out with the Saudi's:

I had read about it, but I had never actually seen the machinery of a totalitarian state in full flight. For anyone who values privacy and freedom, it's a terrifying thing to behold.

Hehe.

It seems that the Australia government is beginning to end it's confusing practice of funding training providers directly and is beginning to use easily understood metrics such as ASCH (Actual Student Contact Hours) instead. This is a huge improvement over previous indicators such as Student Contact Hours which were simply not actual enough and much too easy to fudge.

In fact, the improvement is so great that I suggest the government enforce the practice of putting "actual" in front of every adjective it deals with.

For those who insist that things like "actual" hours is too restrictive, the government has also provided another metric. Which is my personal favourite. We now have Nominal ASCH (or Nominal Actual Student Contact Hours)¹

1. Actual thing

So I'm going to Morocco today. In a few hours. I didn't get to bed super early, as often happens with flying around the world times. But I set my alarm for 6am and felt happy with things. At about 5am I woke up to a strange smell in my room. My room is very small. A bit bigger than a queen sized bed. And I sleep in a loft bed. So I'm not always sure exactly what's happening on the ground. I thought that the dog I am minding had dropped such a bad one that it had woken me up. So I opened the window, sleepily. The smell did not diminish. After some time, I decided it must be vomit. I waited a little longer just to be sure. Eventually, I climbed down out from bed. I found a rather deep pool of wee had collected in the lower end of my room. I'd estimate about 10 litres. I'm not sure how this is possible. It is puzzling. But I mopped it up nonetheless.

Combining Chosen and Bootstrap needs some tweaks to get the widgets to match.

.chzn-container-single .chzn-single {
  padding: 3px 6px;
}

.chzn-container-single .chzn-single div b {
  background-position-y: 6px;
}

.chzn-container-active.chzn-with-drop .chzn-single div b {
  background-position-y: 6px;
}

.chzn-container-single .chzn-single abbr {
  height: 15px;
  background-position-y: 5px;
}

.chzn-container-single .chzn-single abbr:hover {
  background-position-y: 5px;
}

.control-group .controls {
  min-height: 40px;
}

It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve

You don't hear this one so often these days, but for a while it felt like the theological backbone of a lot of Christian anti-homosexual sentiment. It always annoyed me. Rhyming two words together is awesome and funny, but it does not constitute a defence of totalitarian heteronormativity.

It turns out you can build your house on the sand after all. I'm not sure what the consequences of discovering this are for my faith.

Loose sand will provide allowable bearing pressures up to 100 kPa. This conforms with the minimum requirement for bearing pressures of 100 kPa pursuant to AS 1684 Section 2 and AS 2870 Clause 6.5.2(a).

Just had an issue with Smarty choking in Hero CMS. It said it couldn't find the frontpage.thml template. After trawling through Hero, CodeIgniter and Smart code I finally found out that there needs to be a writeable/template_compile directory or Smarty initialization will silently fail (until you need it).

Weird problem... took months to figure out because I'm a bit slow. All taxonomy pages were doing infinite redirect loops if you were logged in, and sending users to the login page if you were logged out. So it was totally broken. In the end the problem was the "demo" taxonomy view that gets packaged with the Views module. It was on (although it seemed without any modifications) and turning it off solved the issue. I spent a long time trying to figure out what was wrong with the view itself and eventually gave up.